2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (37 page)

“It all comes with practice.” I give a pause and then say loudly, “Sir.”

He takes his arm off my shoulder abruptly as if he doesn’t want to be seen with me any more. Obaid might have told them about my sword practice but nobody in the whole world knows about Uncle Starchy’s nectar.

My eyes track General Zia’s feet for any signs. He is walking straight and steady as if his blood has never tasted the tip of my sword.

“Smooth and slow.” I remind myself of Uncle Starchy’s promise.

We sit down in front of a water pipe fitted with a series of stainless-steel taps for our ablutions. My memory of how to do it is vague, so I glance around and do what everybody else is doing. Hands first, then water in the mouth thrice, left nostril, right nostril, splash water over the back of my ears. I keep glancing at General Zia. There is something mechanical about his movements. He takes water in his one cupped hand, pours it into the other, then lets it go before rubbing both his hands on his face. He is not actually using the water. I have a feeling that he is not even doing his ablutions, just miming them. By the time I finish, I have water splashes all over my uniform. The zeal of the occasional worshipper, I suppose.

During the prayer I am again glancing left and right to take my cue whether to go down on my knees or raise my hands to my ears. It seems a bit like cheating at the exam, but I hope the examiner here is more understanding. General Beg seems to think so because he has got his
Top Gun
Ray-Bans on. What kind of person doesn’t want God to look him in the eye while praying? Then I pull my thoughts together and start reciting the only prayer I know. The prayer I said at Colonel Shigri’s funeral, the prayer for the dead.

G
eneral Akhtar salutes with extra care, making sure that his palm is straight, his eyes level, his spine stretched, every muscle in his body throbbing with respect. That Shigri boy lost his marbles in the end but the plane General Zia is about to board has enough VX gas on it to wipe out a village.

General Zia is a dead man and dead men in uniform deserve respect.

Under any other circumstances General Akhtar would have walked with him, right up to the plane, waited for General Zia to climb up the stairs and for the aircraft door to shut before walking back on the red carpet. But the two hundred yards of red carpet that stretches between them and the plane is the distance he is determined not to cover. He has already changed his estimated time of arrival in Islamabad twice and now he needs to leave, right now, even at the risk of appearing abrupt, rude or disrespectful. He, after all, has a country to run.

General Zia, instead of returning his salute, moves forward and put his arms around General Akhtar’s waist.

“Brother Akhtar, I want to tell you a story. I called you because I wanted to share this memory with you. When I was in high school my parents couldn’t afford a bicycle for me. I had to get a ride from a boy in my neighbourhood. And look at us now.” He moves his arm in a half-circle, pointing at the C13O and the two small Cessna planes parked on the tarmac. “We all travel in our own planes, even when we are going to the same place.”

“Allah has been kind to you,” General Akhtar says, forcing a smile. “And you have been kind to me. To us.” He looks towards General Beg whose eyes are fixed on the horizon where a small air force fighter has just taken off on a reconnaissance sortie. The plane’s mission is to search the surroundings for any natural hazards and act as a bogey target in case anyone in the area wants to take a pot shot at Pak One.

Five miles from where the generals stand, the crow hears the roar of an aeroplane approaching. Startled out of its full-stomached slumber, the crow flutters its wings in panic, then gets distracted by a mango rotting on the branch above him and decides to continue his nap for a little longer.

General Zia doesn’t notice that General Akhtar is squirming in his grip, straining to get away. He continues his reminiscence. “People always talk about the past, the good old days. Yes, those were good times, but even then there was nothing like a free ride. Every week my bicycle-owning neighbour would take me to a mango orchard near our school and wait outside while I climbed the boundary wall, went in and came back with stolen mangoes. I hope Allah has forgiven a child’s indiscretions. Look at me now, brothers. Allah has brought me to a point where I have my own ride and my own mangoes gifted by my own people. So let’s have a mango party on Pak One. Let’s bring back the good old days.”

General Beg smiles for the first time. “I am one of those unfortunate people whom Allah has not given the taste buds to enjoy the heavenly taste of mangoes. I am even allergic to the smell. But I hope you enjoy the party. There are twenty crates of them, you can take some for the First Lady as well.” He salutes and turns round to go.

“General Beg.” General Zia tries to muster up an authority that seems to be deserting him. General Beg turns back, his face patient and respectful, but his eyes hidden behind the mercury coating on his glasses. General Zia rubs his left eye and says, “Something has got into my eye. Can I borrow your sunglasses?” General Zia has his eyes fixed on General Beg’s face, waiting for the sunglasses to come off, waiting to get a good look into his eyes. He remembers the intelligence profile he had ordered before giving Beg his promotion. There was something about his taste for expensive perfumes, BMWs and Bertrand Russell. There was nothing about any allergies, nothing about mangoes and absolutely nothing about sunglasses.

Both of General Beg’s hands move in unison. His left hand removes the sunglasses and offers them to General Zia, while his right hand goes into his shirt pocket, produces an identical pair and puts them on. In the moment that his eyes are naked, General Zia discovers what he already knows: General Beg is hiding something from him.

It is General Zia’s right eye that reaches the verdict. His left eye is wandering beyond Beg, beyond the sword-wielding Shigri boy trying to suppress his grin (like father like son, General Zia thinks, no sense of occasion). In the distance the mirage of a man is running on the tarmac. The man is in uniform and he is charging towards them recklessly, breaking the security cordons, ignoring the commandos’ shouts to halt, ignoring their cocked Kalashnikovs, oblivious to the confused snipers’ itching forefingers. They would have shot him if he wasn’t wearing his major’s uniform and if he hadn’t held his hands in the air to show his peaceful intentions. General Akhtar recognises him before anybody else and raises his hand to signal to the snipers to hold their tire. The snipers keep his legs and face in their cross hairs and wait for the mad Major to make any rash moves.

General Akhtar’s relief is that of a man perched on the gallows, the rope already around his neck and a black mask about to come down on his face, the hangman adjusting the lever while saying hangman’s prayer; the man with the noose around his neck looks at the world one last time and sees a messenger on horseback in the distance, galloping towards the scene, flailing his hands in the air.

General Akhtar is relieved to see Major Kiyani.

General Akhtar isn’t sure what message Major Kiyani might have brought, but he is relieved anyway. Just at the moment when he is about to give up praying for divine intervention, his own man has come to the rescue.

General Zia, still stunned at General Beg’s smooth manoeuvre, still holding the sunglasses in his hand, gives only a casual look at the Major who has slowed down now and is approaching them like a marathon runner on his last lap. It is only when he stops a few feet away from them and salutes and General Zia, instead of hearing a solid thud of the military boot, hears the plopping sound of a Peshawan chappal striking the concrete that he looks at the Major’s feet and says, “Bloody hell, Major, why are you running around in your slippers?”

That would prove to be General Zia’s last lucid thought, his last utterance that would make any sense to his fellow travellers on Pak One.

Y
ou might have seen me on television after the crash. The clip is short and everything in it is sun-bleached and faded. It was pulled after the first few news bulletins because it seemed to be having an adverse impact on the nation’s morale. You can’t see it in the clip, but we are walking towards Pak One, which is parked behind the cameraman’s back, still connected to generators and an auxiliary fuel pump, still surrounded by a group of alert commandos. Heat loops around its wings and fuel vapours are rising in whirlpools of white smoke. It looks like a beached whale, grey and alive, contemplating how to drag itself back to the sea. You can see General Zia’s flashing white teeth in the clip but you can tell immediately that he is not smiling. If you watch closely you can probably tell that he is in some discomfort. He is walking the walk of a constipated man. General Akhtar’s lips are pinched, and even though the sun has boiled everything into submission and drained all colour out of the surroundings you can see that his usually pale skin has turned a wet yellow. He is dragging his feet. General Beg is inscrutable behind his sunglasses, but when he salutes and departs, his pace is brisk. He walks like someone who knows where he is going and why You can see me only for a few seconds behind them, my head rising above their shoulders, and if you look really closely you can see that I am the only one with a smile on his face, probably the only one looking forward to the journey. My squad has already flown back on another C13O with their packed lunch of roast chicken and soft buns. I have been invited onto Pak One for a mango party. I hate mangoes but I’ll eat a few if I can see Colonel Shigri’s killer foaming at the mouth and gasping for his last breath.

The clip also doesn’t show that when I salute General Zia and start walking towards Pak One, my smile vanishes. I know I am saluting a dead man but that doesn’t change anything. If you are in uniform you salute; that is all there is to it.

T
he telephone logs kept at Langley’s Ops Room would later reveal that the early shift on the South Asia Desk logged one hundred and twelve calls in an attempt to locate the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel. The search for Arnold Raphel was triggered by a tip-off that the local CIA chief received from a major in the Pakistan Army; there are too many mangoes on Pak One and the air conditioning might not work. Chuck Coogan did not have the patience or the time to work with culture-specific codes. He informed Langley and when the duty analyst told him that they had intercepted a message from a Pakistani general about Pak One and mangoes, Chuck got worried. “Let’s keep the ambassador off that plane.” Chuck Coogan made a mental note to include a paragraph about the breakdown of the chain of command in the Pakistan Army in his monthly debrief and started working the phone.

The calls were routed through the South–East Asia Bureau in Hong Kong, through the Islamabad Embassy and finally through the liaison office in Peshawar. In a last desperate attempt, a communication satellite was ordered to change its orbit to get a bearing on his satellite phone receiver. The logbook wouldn’t mention the reason for this urgency. The logbook wouldn’t say that Arnold Raphel had decided to visit an orphanage associated with a local church in an attempt to not get stuck with General Zia, to avoid the embarrassing post-mortem on the Mi Abram’s performance.

The satellite receiver, a clunky silver contraption cased in a hard plastic box, is switched off and stashed under the back seat of the ambassador’s black Mercedes. The Mercedes is parked in the brick-lined courtyard of a Catholic church under construction. The scaffolding has been covered with white plastic sheets for the ambassador’s visit, the emblem of the Carmelite sisters, with its three stars and a silver cross, hangs limp from the mast on the roof of the church. Behind the Mercedes, the commandos from the Pakistan Army are stretching their limbs in the open-topped jeeps, cooling down under the scarce shade of date trees and listening to the strains of music coming through the church door.

Arnold Raphel is inside the low-ceilinged hall, sitting on the front bench surrounded by barefoot nuns, listening to the strangest choir of his life. There is a man on the harmonium and a twelve-year-old boy sits besides him playing the tabla. “
In the school of the crucified one, in the school of the crucified one
,” sings the man playing the harmonium, and a choir of well-scrubbed children wearing khaki shorts and white half-sleeved shirts stretch their arms out and tilt their heads towards the right to mime the crucified one. The ceiling fan, the iced Coke, the sound of proper American English in this remote desert village, lulls Arnold Raphel, a strange calm descends on him and for a few moments he forgets about the awful tank trial and about his impending return journey with General Zia. This is not the kind of church he occasionally visited in a Washington DC suburb. There is incense on the altar, and the nuns smile at him extravagantly. A plump Jesus painted on a backdrop in various shades of gold and pink, with a marigold garland around his neck, looks down on the congregation with his kohl-lined eyes. “
You don’t pay any fees, you don’t pay any fees
” Arnold Raphel bends forward to hear the nun’s whisper who is translating the hymn for him. “
You don’t pay any fees, in the school of the crucified one
.” His eyes are transfixed by the nun’s bare feet. There are rows and rows of delicate crosses on both her feet, tattooed with henna. A smile plays on Arnold Raphel’s face and he decides to stay on till the end of the service. General Zia can have his own goddam mango party on Pak One, he thinks, I should go back on my own Cessna. “
You have to pay with your head, you have to pay with your head, on the chopping board
.” The orphans cut their throats with imaginary swords and the chorus sings on. “
In the school of the crucified one. In the school of the crucified one
.”

The chief communication officer in Langley throws his hands up in the air and reports that the ambassador is probably having a very long siesta. “Pak One has got clearance to taxi. It is taking off within minutes,” reports the communication satellite picking up the air traffic control’s calls from the garrison. The duty analyst at the South Asia Desk looks at all the calls logged in his register, starting with the first call made by a general with the unlikely name of Beg who had pleaded that the US Ambassador shouldn’t join the mango part on Pak One and decides that there is no need to pursue the matter any further.